“I’m excited about Ive” taking over the Human Interface group at Apple, where he will lead both industrial design and the design of the software that runs on it. “He has good taste.” He paused. “But more important than good taste, he has the ability to” — he points to the MacBook Air in front of me — “he’s true to the materials, to the medium he’s working in. One of my complaints about design of iOS is it’s doing things that aren’t true to the hardware.”

“My design goals with Letterpress were to do things that the graphics hardware was really good at. [Ive] is the kind of person who has the same aesthetic. It’s not superficial — he’d think about [the design of iOS and an iOS device] all the way through” not just make something that looked good, he said.”

Loren didn’t have much to say about Forstall’s ousting, despite the fact that he was on the original iPhone team. He did mention, though, that his new Letterpress app has seen over 1 million downloads since its debut.

And the Atebits developer isn’t the only one who’s thrilled about Ive’s promotion. There’s a sense of excitement throughout the entire iOS community over what the industrial design expert could do for Apple’s mobile OS.

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Letterpress is one of the prettiest apps on iOS. I wish iOS 7 would mimic it

SimonReidy

Agreed. Skeuormorphic design is hopefully on the way out, with a more modern, flat digital design that uses colours tastefully to replace it. Lettepress is a great example of less = more, and shows how good the retina display can look with a modern UI.